Profile: Karin Louw, Karin Louw: Maverick Businesswoman, Mother and Streamliner Extraordinaire

What makes Karin Louw, the director of the up-and-coming Corporate Debt Management firm ‘Maverick and Associates’, tick? In an interview recently, she said that her Cannondale bicycle, her son Josh, and the not-so-straightforward challenges of being a maverick businesswoman, are what makes her world go round. Karin is an expert in the field of debt collection and boasts 16 years of hard earned experience in helping businesses, large-and-small, manage their cash flow challenges. She earned her stripes at the largest South African corporate debt collection agency, attained her Accounting qualifications, started a family and, more impressively, her own company: Maverick and Associates (Pty) Ltd. Her thirst for knowledge isn’t satisfied yet though, because with the launch of her new company she has also enrolled for a paralegal degree, which will position Karin perfectly to give her clients the comprehensive one-stop-solution they need.

While Karin has all the technical know how, she believes that here strong point is her love for working with people, and this skill has served her in good stead. Karin started her career in 2007 in the debt management industry, and soon moved up the ranks, and got to know all the facets of the industry. In 2012, her previous employed decided to implement Streamline as a complete workflow, document and communication management tool, and Karin was intimately involved with the development of the solutions. She soon realised that digitizing the debt collection processes was going to be key to offering a reliable, highly cost effective solution. Over the next few years she worked with the Streamline team to build a total solution, and helped move her employer out of the ‘bricks-and-mortar-and-paper’ (and spreadsheets!) mindset into the converged digital era.

She says: “With the paper-based system there were five or six hundred files lying around. We had no control over specific cases, and that made it very difficult to give meaningful feedback and reports to our clients. When we implemented Streamline, it was so easy that we could just simply look up any record and get up-to-date insight (and assist our clients!) immediately”.

Karin has found that daily processes were flowing much better from a management point of view as well, as she could keep track of where people were spending their time, what was happening, and most importantly - what was NOT HAPPENING. There was just no more excuse to drop the ball. Streamline saved her a lot of time and enabled her to be get away from mind-numbing administrative drudgery and focus on the real pay off: spending time with people - and with her family!

In 2021 she decided to go it alone, resigned and started her own business. The first system she implemented in her company was Streamline. And this is where things REALLY started happening! In the past 2 years Karin has built out her business, but also ramped up the development of her ‘total’ solution. Streamlines’ unique blend of task management, workflow, documents generation and archiving, emails and communication allows her to do the work of 4 people, as compared to how she was taught to do things a few years ago. Streamline now also generates her client reports, keeps track of commission and even automatically reconciles debt payments for her.

Karin believes that every person should follow their path in life. This has allowed her to ‘have it all’! Who says you cannot be a career woman and a mother - and a cyclist! She says that her “passion has doubled”. Instead of needing to ask for the permission of her seniors, she is now in the position to help and empower others. She wishes to continue using Streamline and said that “I will tell every new client about our fantastic system!”